NEL1 9/23/2004 1:21 PM Page 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Lise Nelson and Joni Seager The Poetics of Bodies, Spaces, Place, and Politics my womb a public domain erotica a doormat trampled on by birthright my womb a legislated periphery no longer mine but public space my womb a palestinian front fighting for the right to be a private space “My Womb” by Esmeralda Bernal (reprinted with permission from the publisher of The Americas Review, Houston: Arte Publico Press–University of Houston, 1986) The ideas and materialities woven into Bernal’s poem evoke some of the key insights and sites of feminist geography. Locating her poem within the gendered body, Bernal weaves together the politics of public and private space, the state and nationalism. While no single poem can represent the diverse issues and questions in feminist geog- raphy, the centrality of the body in her poem is significant. Only a few decades after feminists levered “woman” and “gender” into the lexicon of geographic thought, it is “the body” and the multidimensionality of embodied experience(s) that con- tinue to anchor feminist geography at the dawn of the twenty-first century. NEL1 9/23/2004 1:21 PM Page 2 2 LISE NELSON AND JONI SEAGER The body is the touchstone of feminist theory. Within contemporary feminist theory “the body” does not have a single location or scale; rather it is a concept that disrupts naturalized dichotomies and embraces a multiplicity of material and symbolic sites, ones located at the interstices of power exercised under various guises. From the pivotal second-wave feminist understanding that “the personal is political” to the postmodern decentering of a singular notion of gendered experi- ence, feminist theory draws on understandings of embodied experience to funda- mentally challenge bedrocks of Western social and political thought. Feminist geography, anchored in the body, moves across scale, linking the personal and quo- tidian to urban cultural landscapes, deforestation, ethno-nationalist struggles, and global political economies. But what does it mean analytically, theoretically, and methodologically to center the body? What contours define the map of feminist geography? Where is feminism on the map of geography? What do feminist geographers do? This companion to feminist geography approaches these questions by assembling the work of a wide range of contemporary feminist scholars in geography, ones located in Anglo- American as well as global contexts. It examines historiographies of feminist thinking and charts emerging research trajectories that continue to transform not only feminist geography as a field, but the discipline of geography itself. Changing Terrains of Feminist Geography Most chroniclers mark the emergence of feminist geography in North America and the UK in the early 1970s, sparked by movements both within and outside the academy. Within geography, feminist critiques emerged as part of the ferment of “new” radical geographies – especially Marxism – that was raising challenges in the 1970s to the hegemonies of positivistic and corporatist geography (for discussion see Mackenzie, 1984). This was a productive, but also thorny, convergence. The degree of synergy between Marxist and feminist frameworks varied considerably across subfields within the discipline and from country to country; the socialist– feminist intellectual link was much stronger in the UK than in the USA, for example, and remains so today. Clearly feminist geography draws on radical intellectual tra- ditions in the discipline; nevertheless, as feminist geography matured it also served as a corrective – and to some extent as a rebuke – to its radical counterparts which, at least into the 1990s, remained as stubbornly androcentric as mainstream geog- raphy (and in some instances just as openly hostile to feminist approaches). The contested relationship between Marxism and feminism continues to shape epis- temology and intellectual debates within both subfields. From its earliest inception, a defining characteristic of feminist geography was its intellectual cross-fertilization and multidisciplinarity; this remains one of its strengths today. In comparison to other cognate social science fields, geography as a discipline was slower in developing and embracing feminist scholarship; this delayed engagement meant that the critical work already under way in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, political philosophy, and economics was available to the early cohort of geographers who were pioneering feminist geogra- phy. Economist Esther Boserup’s Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) and Barbara Rogers’s The Domestication of Women (1979), for example, were NEL1 9/23/2004 1:21 PM Page 3 INTRODUCTION 3 instrumental in the emergence of the “women and development” subfield in geog- raphy. Early geographical analyses of women’s perceptions of and relationships to new landscapes drew heavily from then-extant feminist research in historical disci- plines, including key works such as Annette Kolodny’s Lay of the Land (1975). Simi- larly, feminist geographical urban and built-environment research was infused by historical, sociological, and architectural work (including, prominently, now-classics such as Jane Jacobs’s (1961) Death and Life of Great American Cities and Dolores Hayden’s (1984) Redesigning the American Dream). Carol Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory (1970) helped inspire feminist geographers interested in gendered divisions between public and private, the state and democracy. The exuberance and vitality of women’s movements outside the academy during the 1970s also strongly influenced the emergence of feminist geography. The women’s liberation movement demanded accountability, visibility, equality. Within feminist geography, this translated first into a project to “add women” to the field, both as producers of knowledge and as subjects of analysis (for discussion see Monk and Hanson, 1982; Mayer, 1989). Starting from the newly legitimated interest in the lives of “real women,” the earliest feminist geographical work focused on mapping (literally and metaphorically) the spatial constraints facing women (for examples see Davies and Fowler, 1971; Hayford, 1974; Tivers, 1977; Ardener, 1981; Seager and Olson, 1986; Seager, 2003; for reviews see Bowlby et al., 1981; Zelinsky et al., 1982). The work of making – and keeping – women’s lives visible is far from complete, and such projects remain at the heart of feminist geography. The efflorescence of feminist geography in the 1980s laid the foundation for many of the subfields and interests that define the contemporary field (for excellent overviews see McDowell, 1992a, b; Domosh, 1999; Longhurst, 2002). In tandem with ground-breaking research on the material realities of women’s lives, feminist geographers in the 1980s adopted and introduced theoretical constructs about the role of gender as an instrumental force and as a category of explanation in geo- graphical processes. Extending work of the previous decade, feminist geographers sought to document and bring into geographical inquiry the analytical significance of gendered spatial divisions between public and private, particularly as they shape work (paid and unpaid), and urban processes (for examples see Christopherson, 1983; Rossini, 1983; Mackenzie, 1986; Nelson, 1986; Pratt and Hanson, 1988). Relatedly, feminist geographers turned to an examination of the spatial and gen- dered dimensions of industrial restructuring, and in the process challenged gendered assumptions within Marxist geography (see Massey, 1984; Murgatroyd et al., 1985). Other scholars sought to make visible women’s roles as actors in built and natural landscapes (for discussion see Monk, 1984). The reverberation of research agendas in the 1980s is still being felt today: fem- inist geographical work in that decade on ecology and social constructions of nature (see, for example, Fitzsimmons, 1989) are at the heart of contemporary work in feminist political ecology. An expanding literature on “women and development” and women’s work in the Global South (see, for example, Momsen and Townsend 1987; Chant and Brydon 1989; Carney and Watts 1990) laid the foundation for a robust subfield, one that today infuses much of the feminist work on globalization and transnational processes. Finally, early feminist forays into political geography (such as Drake and Horton 1983; Peake 1986) led to a 1990 special issue of NEL1 9/23/2004 1:21 PM Page 4 4 LISE NELSON AND JONI SEAGER Political Geography that charted emerging feminist agendas that are still under debate today (Kofman and Peake 1990; see Kofman, chapter 34 in this volume). Key theoretical insights from this period might be summarized by phrases that are now part of our ordinary geographical conventional wisdom: “space is gendered”; “place doesn’t just reflect gender, it produces it”; “sexuality is constructed in place and spatially.” By the 1990s, feminist geographers were actively contributing to broader femi- nist debates that questioned both the unity/singularity of knowledge and the very subject of “woman” that once occupied the central position in feminist thought. While issues such as reproductive rights or the epidemic of violence against women might suggest a unifying gendered experience – perhaps validating a sense of a common “sisterhood” – textured (and textual) analysis of women’s experiences acted out in particular lives and particular places reveals deep cleavages in the notion of what it means to be gendered as a woman.